From Aug. 8 to 12, Unifor held its biennial convention in Toronto, bringing together over 980 delegates representing 260,000 members across the country. Only a few months after a corruption scandal involving former President Jerry Dias, tensions were high and the resolutions, constitutional amendments and hallway discussions reflected this. A new national president and regional executive were elected, but does this signify a new path forward for our union? Has there been a sufficient change at the top of Unifor to rid itself of leaders who used union dues to live luxuriously while rank-and-file members faced two-tier pensions, cuts to real wages and their picket lines broken? Does this mean a fighting union or the same old leadership grandstanding while it makes backroom deals with the bosses to prevent militant action? I attended the convention this past week with fellow Unifor activists and allies to find out.
The leadership contest: Dias clique loses control
On Wednesday of the convention, the vote for National President of Unifor took place. Three candidates put themselves forward.
Scott Doherty, Jerry Dias’ former executive assistant, was the established favourite, until the Dias bribery scandal was revealed. According to a third party workplace investigation, Doherty played a direct role in “increasing pressure” on Chris Macdonald, the whistleblower, into brokering a deal to keep a $50,000 kick-back under wraps. The close relationship between Doherty and Dias was well known among members. However, Doherty also earned authority among a layer of members through his involvement in directing “war rooms” during strikes and lockouts, such as during the refinery lockout in Regina when Dias and other executives were famously arrested by police on the picket lines. However, despite this appearance of militancy, the results did not benefit workers at Regina or in other struggles, like GM Oshawa. Dias himself hand-selected Doherty and a big internal campaign, supported with union resources, had been initiated to secure member votes in the months leading up to the convention.
Lana Payne served as Unifor’s National Secretary-Treasurer from 2019 to 2022, and as the interim president in Dias’s absence since February 2022. Payne was the one who received the formal allegations of corruption against Dias on January 26th. But she and her staff did not reveal this to members until the day after a leaked email was sent to the media in March. Meanwhile, the Unifor leadership under her watch improperly conducted an election campaign months in advance of the actual election, until pressure from members forced her and the Dias loyalists to cancel the campaign and wait until the convention in August. With members furious at these undemocratic methods, an amendment to the union’s constitution was later passed to prevent the leadership from manipulating future elections.
The third candidate was Dave Cassidy, president of Windsor-based Unifor Local 444. In his campaign Cassidy ran on a platform calling for change. However, unlike his competitors, he did not run with a slate of regional representatives.. With fewer resources and less influence nationally, his chances at success were slim, but the results of the vote show that he did provide a vehicle for the backlash against the Dias/Doherty clique—despite not presenting any clear political differences.
In the first round of voting, Cassidy finished with 17.9 per cent of the vote, Doherty with 36.3 per cent and Payne with 45.8 per cent. In the run-off between Doherty and Payne, Payne won the presidency with 60.8 per cent of the vote while Doherty was left with 39.2 per cent. Clearly, a majority of those voting for Cassidy took their vote to the next best option for rejecting the Dias/Doherty clique.
During the vote for regional directors and national Secretary-Treasurer, almost all of Payne’s candidates won, beating out Doherty’s slate except for one, Naureen Rizvi, who narrowly won Ontario director. Rizvi, formerly part of Dias’ executive, was in discussion with Doherty earlier in the year as Doherty was instructed by Dias to pressure Chris Macdonald during the bribery scandal. She was the person who received Chris Macdonald’s portion of the bribe and formally submitted it to Payne for an internal union complaint against Dias. Nobody outside of these backroom discussions may ever know what role these executives like Rizvi played, after years of having served a leader like Dias who had no compunction against taking bribes from big companies and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of member dues per year on luxury expenses. What is clear is that she managed to retain her position, unlike Doherty and the rest of the executives on the slate she ran on.
More than anything else, the result of these votes represent a rejection of those closest to Dias himself and the extreme control they instituted since Unifor was founded in 2013. It is important to understand that these results are symptomatic of the anger present among the 260,000 members who tossed out Doherty as punishment for the Dias scandal. It was also a rejection of the unrelenting bureaucracy that has choked the union for the past nine years, a bureaucracy that has waged war against anyone who speaks out against it, going after their jobs and positions to keep them in line. Payne herself was accused by the Doherty camp of disloyalty, just for the crime of running against Doherty. You can only imagine what a rank and file member would go through if this is what the former National Secretary-Treasurer and interim President endured.
However, does this mean that Payne and company will institute genuine democracy in the union and break from the old ways of governing the union? All of those who have won national and regional executive positions have taken part in the misuse of union resources in the past and worked in positions side-by-side with Dias and Doherty’s slate of executives. What they will do with their new positions of power is yet to be seen, but given the resumes of the new leaders and their actions so far, it does not look promising.
Signs of class collaboration and identity politics
As interim president, Lana Payne and her staff were responsible for organizing the convention in Toronto this past week. They are the ones who invited Liberal Minister of Labour Seamus O’Regan as a guest speaker. In 2018 O’Regan was denounced then-president of the Newfoundland & Labrador Federation of Labour (NLFL) Mary Shortall for voting for back-to-work legislation against the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). It should be noted that the NLFL is Payne’s former federation, where she sat as president for five years. So one would think she is not oblivious to the damage that O’Regan and the Liberals have caused workers in her home province.
This is a shameful continuation of Dias’ class collaborationist policy, which saw Justin Trudeau being invited to the convention in 2019, not to mention Dias contributing to Conservative candidate Kellie Leitch and working closely with Ontario PC leader Doug Ford. At the time of the 2019 convention we explained that giving the strike-breaking, business-friendly Liberals a platform is a betrayal of the workers. From passing back-to-work legislation to gifting billions of working class tax dollars to executives of big corporations, the Liberals are no friends of workers. The Liberals answer to their donors and friends on Bay Street, not organizations meant to fight them for a bigger share of the pie. Just look at the Canadian Labour Congress leadership: they have been lobbying and collaborating with the Liberals for decades with negative results for their 3.3 million members.
Some members of Unifor have lauded Payne’s election as “breaking the glass ceiling”, with her becoming the first female president of a national, private sector industrial union. But what does this actually mean for women in the union or labour movement? It is vital that women have the same opportunities as men in our organizations, but to judge their leadership qualities solely on their gender is insulting and does not get at meaningful discussions about gender equality. If Hillary Clinton became the first female president of the United States, would she stop the bombings of millions of women and children abroad or break down the corporations that exploit women in her country? Anyone who understands politics knows the answer to this question: it is her policies that matter, not her gender. Identity politics is frequently used by our enemies on the right and by corporations to blur the lines in the class struggle.
Regardless of Justin Trudeau’s feminism, or this or that Liberal reform, the fact is that the vast majority of women are working class. As such they face growing economic pressures of the current crisis, and they bear the weight of stagnating wages and increased costs of living more than men. The bosses are making the workers pay for the crisis of capitalism, including, disproportionately, working class women. Where is Trudeau’s feminism in his approach to CUPW, which has been struggling for years to win pay equity for its members, as just one example? So long as the wealth of the bosses depends on the exploitation and oppression of the working class, true equality will be out of reach for women.
To win gains for working class women, what they need is a fighting union. A union not afraid to organize for strike action and radical tactics that challenge the bosses governments.
How to Build a Transparent, Democratic and Militant Union
On the opening day of convention Payne gave a speech where she said: “Friends, we are in a moment, a moment of renewed worker militancy. And we must seize this moment.” This militancy was expressed by two guest speakers at the convention.
Some of the clearest examples of this renewed militancy come from the United States, where in the face of rising inflation and crisis there has been an upswing in grassroots organizing. Guest speaker Derrick Palmer, lead organizer with the Amazon Labor Union, spoke to this. Palmer gave a rousing speech calling on workers across Canada and the USA to “take the power back” and even for a “general strike”, referring to the need for militant action not just in a single workplace or union, but across the entire movement. Another guest, Mexican trade unionist Alejandra Morales Reynoso, accepted an award for her role in fighting against corrupt corporate-controlled unions at a GM factory in Silao. She and her 5,000 coworkers decided to create an independent union and organized a militant struggle to win high wage increases. These are powerful examples from militant trade unionists on the first day of convention for Canada’s largest private sector union. But it is yet to be seen how Payne will put her own words into action.
The situation facing all of Unifor’s members, and other workers both unionized and non-unionized, is serious. Corporations and their friends in government are coming after workers to make them pay for the economic crisis. We are living in unprecedented times, with recession and class struggle on the horizon. In Ontario alone, hundreds of thousands of education workers are in a war of words with the Conservative government. There is a marked increase in strikes across the country. The Trudeau Liberals are preparing to threaten back-to-work legislation against federally regulated workers who stand up and fight.
But despite threats from the government, unions have a powerful weapon. Workers have the ability to shut down production and undermine the profits of their bosses until their demands are met. It was the power and class insticints of rank-and-file Unifor members that initiated the blockades at GM Oshawa. The only way to harness this power and fight back against the bosses is rank-and-file control over the union.
Rank-and-file workers have shown a willingness to fight against the bosses. What they need are leaders that are equally willing to use class struggle methods to fight back and win. To ensure leaders are in their positions to defend the interests of the members and not for personal gain, every union position must be regularly elected—no back room deals to put certain individuals into power. To maintain the connection between the leadership and the membership, no union official should be paid more than the wage of the members they represent. Currently, the wages of the Unifor national executive are in excess of six figures, the national president of Unifor has a salary of $170,000, plus the many perks that come from abusing the expense account. This puts the union leadership in a different universe from the rank and file. We need to expunge careerism from the movement—leaders need to live for the workers and not off the back of the workers. All positions should be subject to immediate recall whenever a leader refuses to struggle against the bosses or violates the democratic rights of the rank and file.
These are the basic principles of union democracy that can challenge the current secretive culture at the top of Unifor. Many still have questions as to the details of the investigation into the Dias corruption scandal, even though delegates at convention were told “we can now move on”. But we still don’t know what was done with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent from the union expense accounts over the last nine years. A financial audit is not enough, members need to know details of the expense accounts of the executive to keep leadership honest. Now is a good time to begin a real fight for genuine democracy and transparency in our union.
Now more than ever, workers’ organizations like ours are coming under pressure to fight just to keep their members’ gains. If we cannot achieve transparency and genuine democracy within the union, we will be weakened. These times call for a militant fighting leadership; whether the current Unifor leaders are capable of producing this or not, the pressure from below will force it to the surface. Just like the pressure to change the leadership has been successful, there will be pressure to keep the new leadership to account. As a Unifor member, myself and my fellow activists will work to fight so that this is the case. We welcome those who agree with these principles to join us in this fight.